Chapter 4. Vetting External Links
In This Chapter
Identifying inbound links
Avoiding poor links
Identifying quality links
Making the most of outbound linking
Handling advertising links
Dealing with link spam issues
In this chapter, we discuss inbound links. Inbound links are the links coming into your site. If you are Bob's Classic Car Customization, and you get a link from Motormouth Mabel's Classic Car Boutique, that's an inbound link. In addition to rankings by content, part of how search engines rank pages is based on inbound links. Google's description of their PageRank system (a part of Google's link algorithm) for instance, notes that Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote of confidence, by page A, for page B. That means that they read an inbound link from another page as a testimonial link in your page, as if it means, "Hey, this guy knows what he's talking about!" Unfortunately, like a lot of things in life, there are good inbound links and bad inbound links.
In this chapter, we discuss the difference between the good and the bad links, how to avoid the bad links, and how to figure out the good ones. We talk about making the most of outbound linking. We also discuss handling all of your advertising links and dealing with link spam issues.
Identifying Inbound Links
So how do you know who's linking to you? Well, going back to Chapter 2 of this minibook, we had you solicit a bunch of links from other sites. Generally, those are the links you're going to know about. ...
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